Eric Sykes - If I Don’t Write It Nobody Else Will

Mr Sutcliffe would throw the ball to someone, anyone, and point out somebody else to bat and the game began. Mr Sutcliffe looked on with a bored expression, occasionally glancing at his wrist watch so that he wouldn’t be late getting back to the warm common room. However, in one particular session he took off his jacket, handed it to me and picked up the bat, which I’d laid down while I buckled on my pad. He threw the ball casually to one of the lads, and then he surveyed the fielders, gesturing for them to spread out more. It was obvious that he’d done this before on a much higher canvas. Nodding to the bowler, he took up his stance and we all crouched in readiness. What happened next was like a page out of comic cuts. It was an innocuous ball, not quick, but falling short, and then for some unaccountable reason the ball reared up and caught Mr Sutcliffe on the bridge of his nose. His glasses flew off, and he stumbled back, knocking his stumps over.

‘Howzat?’ screamed the bowler.

Mr Sutcliffe struggled unsteadily and glared myopically around him. The bowler was quick-witted and, seeing Mr Sutcliffe’s glasses on the ground, took the opportunity of merging with the rest of the field.

‘You stupid boy,’ he yelled at nobody. ‘I wasn’t ready. What’s your name?’

There was no answer and when I picked up his glasses and handed them to him he saw that there was no one at the other end. We all knew who the bowler was, but there wasn’t a chance in a hundred that anyone would give him away.

One thing is certain, though: Mr Sutcliffe wasn’t much of a cricketer. Any decent batsman for Werneth would have hooked the ball for six.

That was the end of cricket for the day, and so I didn’t have my turn with the bat. Dissatisfied with the world in general, I limped off, although there was nothing wrong with my foot—my limp was because of the cricket pad buckled on to my left leg, obviously made for someone much taller than me. Ah well, I still maintain it was another century I never made.

Our classes weren’t always mixed. For instance, the boys attended a carpentry class and the girls beavered away at domestic science, mainly cookery. Mr Barker’s class, as I mentioned earlier, was mixed and to my shame I can’t remember any of the girls, not even the one I was passionately in love with, although she didn’t know it. I never approached or spoke to her but I recall following her home to the centre of Oldham, where she disappeared through the back door of a pub, and then with a great sigh I turned round and floated home in a euphoric haze.

My most vivid memory after school finished for the day was watching the staff going home. Mr Barker went hatless, dragged along by the weight of his stomach down Ward Street towards Featherstall Road in order to catch a tram to wherever he was going. The English master, Mr Wilton, would invariably be striding casually twenty yards behind him—perhaps they didn’t like each other. Some of the teachers went the other way to board trams going in another direction. No member of the staff, not even the headmaster, possessed a car. Cars were still a rare sight and an expensive novelty, and teachers, as today, were underpaid; but even so all the male staff managed to wear suits with a collar and tie and Miss Thomson wore respectable frocks.

I may have treated the staff with a levity they don’t deserve. Discipline was paramount and by and large they were all respected, and we pupils had no difficulty in addressing the masters as ‘sir’ and the lady teachers as ‘miss’. Although I wasn’t a credit to the school academically, when I finally left school, like every other pupil I could read, write, add up, subtract and divide. In other words, I had been equipped with the basic skills, preparing me for the next stage of the journey, and thankfully that did not include sex education—that was an adventure to come, as and when the bugle sounded. I have long had a theory that pupils who pass their leaving exams with high marks in every subject may be star pupils but when they face the real world they lose a lot of their sparkle and can be likened to a blind man whose guide dog has left home. On the other hand, many, many brilliant entrepreneurs, artists, writers, etc., proudly boast that their final reports were abysmal, so I wasn’t as upset as my father when he read what the headmaster had written as a footnote to my school leaving report: ‘Inclined to be scatterbrained’. Ho hum, you can’t win ‘em all.

My schooldays were over and presumably I was well equipped to take my place as a member of the working class. First, however, let me sum up the last fourteen years. They were mainly a pleasurable experience, although there were bad times as well, but I haven’t included these simply because I can’t remember them, and to my adolescent mind the bad times invariably happened to other people. For myself there were only two major problems: trying to keep warm during the cold winters which swept across the north-west for several months and staving off hunger, a condition endemic during the depression of the early thirties.

In looking back over my schooldays at Northmoor and Ward Street Central, I am appalled by my lack of attention to my education. For instance, when the history master declaimed that William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066 following the Battle of Hastings, that was the last thing I heard. But in my mind’s eye I saw William beaching the long boat, French soldiers leaping into the surf to storm the beaches yelling Gallic obscenities at the British troops, and King Harold looking up towards a shower of arrows a very silly thing to do—and his ostler, too late with his warning, gasping as King Harold said, ‘Ooh’, and slid from the saddle with an arrow in his eye—‘The King’s copped it.’ And just then I was brought back to the present day as the bell went for us to change classes, but whatever subject, maths or woodwork, my imagination still wove vivid pictures of the tale of the Battle of Hastings, until a geography lesson in which the mention of Mount Kilimanjaro had me halfway up the mountain pursued by Zulus before the bell rang for the end of the day.

So it is hardly surprising that academically I wasn’t exactly a star pupil; in fact wallowed about for most of my schooldays at the bottom of the class. That is except in one subject, art, and the marks I got for this, year by year, were never less than ninety-eight out of a hundred.

During the last week of my school life, parents of the pupils about to enter the uncertain world of work were invited to a half-day visit to the school in order to wander round inspecting some of the projects their offspring had been engaged in. My parents couldn’t be there because Dad was working in the Standard Mill in Rochdale while Mother had taken her old job back in the card room of another mill about three miles beyond Royton. What with their wages plus Vernon’s and soon, hopefully, mine we would be able to afford rabbit every Sunday. Dad usually took a sandwich for his dinner in the factory but Mother fared better. Grandma Ashton cooked something nice and hot, put it in a basin, wrapped the whole thing in a red-spotted hankie and made her way to the tram stop. When the tram arrived, she handed Mother’s dinner to the conductor and he put it on the floor by his feet; then ‘ting ting’ and off went the tram about three miles down the line to where Mother met it, the dinner was handed over to her and perhaps ‘Smells good, missus’ from the conductor and off to Rochdale. This private delivery service occurred every workday, no money, no ‘What’s this, then?’—all smiles, even when it was raining. Oh, what a gentle, caring age we lived in!

To return to parents’ day at Ward Street Central School: as the star pupil in art, I was given a large sheet of rough paper, three feet by two, with carte blanche to paint whatever I fancied. Without hesitation I began to sketch a huge liner thrusting headway through a choppy sea. Parents filed into the classroom to watch my progress. I was completely enraptured—it was turning out to be a good painting. While wiping my hands on a rag, I surveyed my work, wondering if a couple of fish being thrown about would enhance the bow wave. I dismissed the thought as I still hadn’t finished the superstructure. By this time the room was beginning to fill up with parents, and two teachers were enlisted to keep the crowd moving. I was daubing red paint on the paper, creating the first of three funnels, when a man’s hand shot out, pointing to the bows and exclaiming that I’d forgotten to paint in the hole for the anchor. He was loud, and there was a crush of people eager to spot the mistake. I was pushed forward and in flinging out my arm to save myself inadvertently I upset the pot of red paint and my marathon work was over: Michelangelo had fallen off his pedestal and his floating Sistine Chapel disappeared under a spreading red sea. My hopes were dashed; I’d had visions of hanging it over the dresser in the kitchen. Optimistically I thought, There is plenty more where that came from, which just goes to show that you can’t be right all the time.